EXTENDING from Vandervoort Avenue just north of Metropolitan Avenue are a pair of odd dead ends that I would daresay would stump even the most died-in-the-wool Brooklyn street expert. Rewe Street, unlit but quite busy with various wholesale businesses, runs east a few hundred feet to where it hooks south, with the “hook” being Ivy Hill Road. In the past, Ivy Hill Road may have led to a now-vanished pier on English Kills called Chapman’s Dock. If there were ever any ivy-covered hills here they have long since vanished.
Ivy Hill Road was given its porcelain-coated sign with raised letters sometime in the 1940s or 50s. Only its remote location kept the Department of Transportation from noticing it and replacing it with a modern green and white. Uh oh…what have I done?
Plenty, as it turned out. As you can see in the title card image taken by Mark Foggin in 2023, the Department of Transportation has indeed discovered it and replaced it with a modern green and white, in upper and lower case as a now decade-old directive ostensibly from the federal government dictated.
Would it have hurt to keep the old enamel sign there? The road is little trafficked except for workers at the Marjam facility, primarily Monday through Friday. Probably not. But to the DOT, that’s not the point. The directive is to remove old signs with the purpose of identifying roads more efficiently, and they’d tell you they’re not running a museum. That said…I hope the old sign was preserved either in someone’s bedroom but preferably will wind up in a museum.
Sick transit, Gloria!
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4/22/23